1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an interface for a transaction system and, more specifically, to a mobile banking architecture.
2. Description of the Background Art
With the prevalence of wireless data service over cellular phones, many business operations have facilitated access to their online services by providing their own services specifically tailored to these phones. For example, merchants may operate a mobile webpage separate from their primary webpage which is specially formatted to ease navigation by a cell phone user. Since cell phones suffer from a number of accessibility issues, often due to the limited input and output options, providing means for interacting with the business that are specially designed for cell phone users may be the only way of ensuring a quality experience.
Financial institutions are among the business operations that attempt to cater to cell phone users. As previously discussed, often this includes designing a special web page for cell phone users to access their account information, taking into account display constraints on a cell phone screen and the input capabilities of a cell phone. Other financial institutions may instead rely on an automated service which a telephone user may call, allowing the user to navigate a series of prompts in order to perform a financial transaction.
Although the efforts of these financial institutions, as well as other business operations, has increased the efficiency of interacting with the business using either data or voice communications on cellular phones, implementing such facilities often involves tremendous expenditure by the business. Not only must the business run a service for accepting the communications from its customers, but must also design, implement, and maintain the infrastructure which allows the communications received from its customers to manipulate their records on the business' existing systems.
Accordingly, what is desired is an interface for enabling business operations, such as financial institutions, to rapidly integrate a variety of communication channels, such as mobile data communications, into their business systems.